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Quotations Whose Publication May Cause My Arrest For "Sedition" Under GW Bush's Misnamed "Patriot" Act, Indefinite Detention, Secret Trial In A Foreign Land Before A Military Tribunal, And ExecutionSelected by Ronald Bradley
The following quotations about the nature of government were extracted from HL Mencken's masterful (and enormous) A New Dictionary Of Quotations On Historical Principles. Interestingly, the book was published in 1942 – during an earlier (and Constitutionally declared) war. "When good government prevails men of little worth submit to men of great worth. When bad government prevails men of little power submit to men of great power." ~ Mencius, c. 300 BC "Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos." ~ Polybius, c. 125 BC "A good government produces citizens distinguished for courage, love of justice, and every other good quality; a bad government makes them cowardly, rapacious, and the slave of every foul desire." ~ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BC "He who wishes to be a tyrant, and does not slay Brutus, and he who wishes to establish a free state, and does not slay the sons of Brutus, maintains his work for only a short time." ~ Machiavelli, 1531 "The world is ruled by a certain few, even as a little boy of twelve years old rules, governs and keeps a hundred great and strong oxen upon a pasture." ~ Luther, 1569 "I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will." ~ King James I, 1621 "When a government lasts a long while it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty." ~ Montesquieu, 1748 "In rivers and bad governments the lightest things swim at the top." ~ Franklin, 1754 "In all sorts of government man is made to believe himself free, and to be in chains." ~ King Stanislaus of Poland, 1763 "Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst stage, an intolerable one." ~ Paine, 1776 "Government is, abstractedly taken, an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness." ~ Jefferson, 1796 "Every nation has the government it deserves." ~ de Maistre, 1811 "Whatever government is not a government of laws is a despotism, be it called what it may." ~ Webster, 1835 "The less government we have the better." ~ Emerson, 1841 "The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him." ~ Stirner, 1845 "Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy." ~ Proudhon, 1849 "The authority of government can have no pure right over my person or property but what I concede to it." ~ Thoreau, 1849 "No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent." ~ Lincoln, 1854 "All government is evil." ~ Haydon, 1876 "Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us." ~ Tolstoi, 1893 "Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient." ~ Brandeis, 1928 "For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching." ~ FDR, 1932 And from Mencken himself….. "A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar." "There’s no underestimating the intelligence of the American public." "Wars will never cease until babies come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands." "To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason." "All government is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man." "We suffer most when the White House is bursting with ideas."
December 4, 2001 Ronald Bradley [send him mail] is director of the Hippocrates Health Centre of Australia. Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com The
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